A brand new site for the world's leading car brand

It was every UX designer's dream project (although at that time we called ourselves IAs), and one that today is almost unheard-of: a website redesigned from scratch for one of the biggest brands in the world.

I was a senior IA working alongside lead, mid-Level and junior colleagues, with responsibility for the Range Selector ("Search & Select"), the Used Cars section, Which Model (compare function), the Owners Area and Feedback functionality.

From the five task statements on the home page via its multiple range filters to the seamless Car Configurator built in Flex, the site was consistently rated as the UK’s leading and most influential car manufacturer website.

The watchword was "seamless". Aesthetically it was a clear descendant of DDB's disarmingly uncluttered advertising campaign originating in the days of Mad Men. Built using Adobe's Flex – a Flash-based component library – the intention was to create a site that was centred on the cars – all of them high-res rendered computer models – with a quality of user experience for each car's home page that would make launch microsites redundant.

Since then it has been through many optimisation cycles: most notably the cleansing of every trace of Flash from the site, then its transformation under my supervision into an adaptive site and a completely new configurator in modular HTML components. Throughout all this time, Psyma scores have consistently ranked it as one of the very best car sites in the UK, while in 2013 it was assessed by the Website Report as number one amongst all the car sites in the UK (see left).